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EMC rode a swelling tide of storage growth and increased customer migration to cloud computing resulting in record quarterly and full-year revenue and profit during its fourth quarter of 2010.
Strong growth in its high-end and mid-tier storage products, combined with increased sales and profit from VMware and RSA, were among the key contributors to a quarter and a year which the company said paves the way for improvements in 2011 and beyond.
EMC on Tuesday reported that revenue for its fourth quarter of 2010, which ended December 31, reached $4.9 billion, up 19 percent compared to the fourth quarter of 2009. The company also reported a profit of $628.6 million, or 29 cents per share, up 53 percent compared to the $390.6 million, or 19 cents per share, it reported last year.
For all of 2010, EMC reported revenue of $17 billion, up 21 percent compared to last year's $14 billion. The company also said profit for the year reached $1.9 billion, or 88 cents per share, up 66 percent over last year's reported profit of $1.1 billion, or 53 cents per share.
EMC's U.S. revenue reached $2.6 billion in the fourth quarter, up 20 percent over last year. It accounted for about 53 percent of the company's total revenue.
Fourth quarter sales of EMC's high-end Symmetrix storage product portfolio increased 19 percent over last year, while sales of its mid-tier storage portfolio was up 23 percent, EMC said. The company also said that VMware revenue increased 38 percent and that RSA security revenue increased 28 percent over last year. Only its Information Intelligence Group reported a slight decline, about 2 percent, due to customer transitions to new products.
David Goulden, executive vice president and CFO at EMC, called cloud computing one of the key drivers for EMC's growth.
The journey to the cloud continues to advance in phases, Goulden said. The first phase, virtualization, is all about increasing customer efficiency. "On the average, customers have virtualized about 30 percent of their applications," he said.
In the second phase, customers are adopting virtualized applications in their business production environments, followed by Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).
EMC is an important part of all three phases, Goulden said. "What's important, whether customers are entering the first phase or the third, we have the technology to help them on their way," he said.
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